The light was barely there, just enough contrast between the dark and the less dark to see silhouettes. I sat in my camp chair, drinking coffee, letting my mind wander.
I saw them then – the robins. Dark, fluffed up things in the bare cherry tree. One, then another and another, I shivered with fear as the scene of Tippi Hedron running from the murderous birds of Alfred Hitchcock’s imagination. Why were they congregating here, so early. What were their intentions.
As the light grew to be more like the light of my memory, I saw there were close to two dozen. I could make out the juveniles from the adults. Then there were thirty, then more. I felt the urge to get in the house but waited. What was going on?
Finally the sky began to turn blue and the night was on the run. A few boughs of the cherry began to bounce as one by one, the robins took flight heading straight to the pyracantha tree at the other end of the yard. They attacked it, besieged it, the thirty some odd birds alighting all over it.
Then I saw it, what they were after – the berries. Frantically, they devoured the red berries, some hanging upside down, swaying, desperately hanging on. But this was not all.
After about 5 minutes of feasting, the robins began flying wildly, all over the yard, back and forth, high and low; one flew into the picture window behind me, bouncing off, walking dazed until unsteadily flying off again. It was then that I realized they were drunk.